Foreign Bodies

By Paige Aniyah Morris

2020 Essay Contest Honorable Mention

I must have been in the eighth grade when I first showed the doctor my hands. He read me the symptoms like a fortune-teller tracing futures in the lines of my palms:

• parched skin that had cracked and scored itself

• a hot and unbearable itch

• aching pustules that had surfaced and burst, leaving my hands shiny with serum and blood

Atopic dermatitis is a chronic skin condition commonly known as eczema. Outbreaks can appear on the soft skin at the backs of the knees, the inner folds of the arms, smattered like freckles across the face and chest. Mine, in particular, spans the soles of my feet and creeps up to overtake my ankles, covers the palms of my hands all the way down to my wrists. The doctor prescribed me a hydrocortisone cream for it and told me not to worry. Eczema, he said, is but a mild immunodeficiency.

The body’s immune system is designed to guard against infection and disease. Antibodies recognize an object as foreign and react. The nose runs, the eyes gloss over, the skin erupts in hives. All to rid the body of intrusions. The immune system is a human system, which is to say it is a flawed one. Sometimes, it sees threats where there are none. The body reacts to the most minor provocations. The whole of the anodyne world becomes a hazard. Dust, pollen, dander, nuts. Lead in the pipes, sticky summers in a grimy city. Whenever my skin erupted in hives as a child, it was hard to tell whether my hypersensitivity to the world was the cause or the outcome, the reason or merely the result.

Then again, whose body wouldn’t riot in my hometown? Like almost anyone raised in Jersey City, New Jersey—the oft-neglected wart on the side of New York’s hand—I dreamed of quiet nights, clean air and leadless water, roach-free apartments and streets empty of rats. I knew nothing, then, of how the body worked, sometimes against itself. The remedy seemed simple—I needed a change of environment.

The problem was that no one I knew ever traveled. We were poor, and as far as my folks were concerned, we were content. What more was there for us to see of the world? I envied—then came to resent—their sense of rootedness, how they had settled like dust in a corner. And they always wanted to know: What you want to leave so bad for? Where you in such a hurry to go?

 The eczema gave me what felt like snakeskin—scaly and rough, constricting me as I fought to expand and tear out of it. If my skin were indeed like a snake’s, maybe I could shed it. Grow it anew. But because I am merely human, I took the window seats on Greyhound buses. I boarded planes. Sometimes, when there was no other way to get somewhere, anywhere else, I ran.

I moved to Rhode Island for college. Right after graduation, I relocated to South Korea on a Fulbright grant. With every move, I became convinced I might be cured. I made infrequent trips back home, living out of a suitcase in my parents’ basement when I visited to save time packing for the next departure. When I was away, my palms were smoother. My feet no longer ached.

 But in my travels I began to notice another sort of allergen prickling my skin. Whereas I had been surrounded by shades of brown in my hometown, even as my brown was often tinged with various shades of red, I was suddenly a rarity in writing classes at my predominantly white university. In Korea, too, people turned their heads to stare, ran their hands over my arms and studied their fingers to see if any of the color had come off. My body did not respond with hives. Only heat and nervous sweat. My heart raced with a panic that was not quite anaphylactic, but still felt like it might suffocate me. I wasn’t having constant flare-ups of eczema or allergic reactions as often anymore, yet I was living with what felt like another skin condition I couldn’t shed. I had traded a city whose filth attacked my skin for places where my skin itself might be seen as dirt.

I was out of college and living in Korea for half a year when I decided I needed to escape this new itch. At the start of my first winter recess, I planned a solo trip throughout Asia with stops in multiple countries. Now, I wonder if that wanderlust was rooted less in a desire to travel and more in an impulse to test a theory. Maybe if I was always in motion, I could outrun my skin and all its conditions.

I left from Incheon Airport feeling unprecedentedly clean. For the three days I was in Thailand, I lived in the heart of that feeling. I had an open itinerary for the trip and what felt like infinite hours in the Chiang Mai sun. The first thing I did when I arrived at my guesthouse was shove the winter clothes I had worn from Korea to the bottom of my carry-on bag. I donned loose skirts when I went for strolls in the mornings. In the evenings, I browsed the markets, happy not to haggle my way to a discount on such lovingly carved statues and soaps.

I took a cooking class the second night I was in Chiang Mai and marveled at what my hands could do when they weren’t all riled up—use a mortar and pestle to crush fresh chili peppers into a perfectly smooth curry paste, test the firmness of a lime with a squeeze before halving it to zest, sprinkle cilantro into the pot of broth that would become my tom yum soup. With every minute that passed, I felt I was shedding my old, rough snakeskin, leaving behind what had long weighed me down. Suddenly, I felt a kinship with the cats that lounged in the shade of the temples, swaying their coiled-up tails. I no longer felt on edge at every ripple in the air, didn’t feel the need to bat away the mosquitoes that hung around me like dust motes but did not bite, not once.

On my last morning in Chiang Mai, I caught a tuk-tuk to the airport at dawn, my whole body humming with contentment. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this way. Happy to be where I was, even if it was a place I was simply passing through.

I arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Metro Manila high on that optimism and, within an hour of landing, felt regret setting in. I was most struck by the sights outside the window of the airport shuttle that brought me to my Airbnb in the heart of the metropolitan area. Only later, after I’d begun to unpack, did I consider that perhaps my discomfort came from the fact that, at first glance, Manila did not feel like an escape for me. As I lay awake in bed one of those first nights, I restlessly tapped out my early impressions of the city.

Manila is a needy place, I wrote. (Too much like home, I could have written.) The air smells of animal waste and exhaust fumes. Everything spills into the streets. Each step I take is onto crumbling concrete, around the outstretched feet of homeless children, away from men who whistle and call out to me, offering to take me wherever I want to go. Already, I feel itchy.

Nine years earlier, when I was a high school freshman back in New Jersey, I collapsed in Bayonne Park with a rash that engulfed my entire body. Calamine lotion. Epsom salts. Oatmeal baths. Nothing stopped the itching, the swell of hives on the skin. The dermatologist who first diagnosed the eczema said this was something different: a grass allergy that, in its most severe forms, triggers the mass release of histamines, compounds that inflame tissues in the skin. My allergies made it so that I couldn’t walk past lawns, through parks, on tree-lined streets. I became convinced that everything outside my house could ruin me.

On my second day in the Philippines, I went for a walk in Rizal Park. I’d thought I could avoid lawns by staying close to paved paths, but there was more grass than I had anticipated for a park in the heart of such an urban area, and I felt the itch starting up beneath my palms, my fingers immediately growing hot with hives. Yet the afternoon weather was so gorgeous, I didn’t want to leave. With monuments and fountains throughout, the way Rizal Park was laid out reminded me of parks in Manhattan or D.C. I felt most and least like a tourist there, sitting on a bench and watching children play, parents eating ice cream or halo-halo purchased from the vendors on the park’s periphery. Kids ran past trailing kite strings, chasing one another through the winding paths.

I thought nothing of it when a group of three children approached me where I sat on the bench and greeted me. They were young, the oldest of them no older than twelve, and small, their legs thinner than my wrists. They stroked and marveled at the skin of my arms, which had tanned impressively in the Manila sun. “Where are you from?” one of them, the oldest, asked in English. “Pilipina ka ba?”

“I’m American,” I answered, amused at the thought that I might have been mistaken for a local all this time. My skin was a near-identical shade of brown as that of the lightest-skinned of the children, and aside from my accent, there was not much else to betray me as an outsider. I might have even felt comforted by the implication of the error. I was not so foreign that I might trigger a reaction.

Then the oldest one turned to the younger two and said something in Tagalog. All three children held out their palms. Their skin was smooth. Untroubled by the heat. “We’re hungry, ma’am,” the oldest said. “We need money for food.” I hadn’t brought any cash with me that afternoon, since I’d planned only to see the museums and the park. My face burned with shame. The children ran off in search of someone else who clearly did not belong.

That night, in that city, my eczema flared up more violently than it had in years. I couldn’t sleep, the skin begging to be scratched. I pleaded with my fingers for forgiveness. My hands burned, dead skin and pus sloughing off my knuckles, my wrists. I spent most of the remainder of the trip in bed, listening to the city pleading through the walls, the shut windows.

Days later, as I was leaving, either in the cab on the way to the airport or in the terminal awaiting my departure, I must have written my last notes on the city with fingers I could hardly feel by then.

In some ways, it was familiar. Everyone was brown like me, the traffic was thick, the city hurt to look at.

The last stop of my winter trip was Japan. When I landed at Narita International Airport, I paid 2,000 yen to shower in the airport’s lounge, to scrub all the memory of Manila and the evidence of the eczema off my skin. Like a miracle, the hives retreated within a half hour of landing. As I boarded an airport bus that would bring me from the airport in the suburbs to the heart of Tokyo, I could almost convince myself that my week in the Philippines had been a fever dream. Looking at my hands where they fidgeted in my lap, I squinted to make out the fresh scars from where I had scratched and broken the skin not even a day before.

It felt like winter in Tokyo. When I was in college, I found that I was sensitive to New England’s bitter winters and false springs. On crisp mornings, I would step outside and make it only a block or two before the hives began to spread. I’d scratch through my clothes, run for a bathroom and pull down my stockings or pants to see the swollen, splotchy mess of my thighs. I started to carry around Band-Aids to stanch the blood that would surface from all the scratching.

Cold urticaria is an allergic condition in which the skin reacts within minutes of exposure to cold. Even experts are not sure what causes this condition. Paranoid skin cells that perceive even the natural chill of the air as a threat? A violent and reactionary bloodstream? In any case, the body sets itself on fire so the cold has nowhere to roost.

Where Manila had been a swamp of heat and filth, Japan was cool and almost boringly pristine. No one paid much attention to me there, for which I was grateful after my time in the Philippines, but soon after I arrived, the loneliness of that fact consumed me.

I wasn’t in Tokyo long enough to remember where I’d been. A friend and I went out clubbing one night. We took the train to some district on the far end of the city, but after we arrived, I lost her somewhere in the crowd to a stranger with whom she would pursue a one-night stand. She left me alone at the bar in a city where I knew no one and nothing of the language being slurred all around me.

When the club closed at 3 a.m., I found myself fighting to stay awake outside the subway station in the freezing cold. My legs were numb, the nerves too alive with pain to even pace for warmth. The more I tried to keep active and move about, the more the cold angered my skin. I had no cash on me, just a transportation card with an unknown amount of money left on its balance. I put my phone away on ten percent battery. I couldn’t use it, anyway. My fingers were so swollen, so stiff.

The subway station opened around 5 a.m. and the first train arrived a half hour later. Japanese locals leapt icily over sleeping and passed-out bodies in the stairwell leading down into the station. Pools of vomit were like sleet puddles, easily sidestepped. People seemed untroubled, confident all these blemishes, too, would vanish by the time the morning rush began.

I had just enough money on my transportation card, paired with some coins I scavenged on the floors of the station near vending machines, for the ride to Yotsuya-Sanchome. On the subway, all the bleary-eyed passengers who had camped out at the station for the first train were either asleep or somewhere on another plane of existence. I knew I looked haggard, exhausted, and strange. But that morning, all the passengers on the metro were looking past me, through me. Silently, I thanked Tokyo for its quiet, its cold.

When I landed back in Korea, winter had subsumed the northern half of the country. Through the windows of the train from Incheon Airport into Seoul, I watched snow fall on the mountains and trees. I pressed my fingers to the glass and wondered how long it might take for my skin to react. Soon enough, the cold became painful. I returned my hands to my lap.

I transferred to another train headed for the bus terminal and sat across from an older woman who gawked at me. She whispered to the woman next to her. I caught snatches of the conversation, about the foreigner, the Black one, her hair. She had never seen someone like me in person.

Her skin. My goodness, look at her skin.

Long ago, when I received my first diagnosis, the doctor told me this might not have to be forever. Some people outgrow such skin conditions. One day, as inexplicably as they had begun, the hives disappear. The skin goes dormant.

On the train, I pressed my palms to my burning face. The nerves tingled in the pads of my fingers. As the light of the early afternoon broke over the mountains, I sat back, breathed on my hands, and willed my skin to sleep.

Published February 14th, 2021